Cynthia LeBrun grew up in Kelowna, British Columbia and studied to be a teacher at Simon Fraser University. She taught in a northern one—room schoolhouse west of Fort St. John, as well as the isolated logging camp of Phillips Arm, and finally in Campbell River. Black Sunflowers is inspired by the vivid memories of her mother—in—law, who grew up in Soviet Occupied Ukraine. Cynthia now lives and writes in the beautiful Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, where she enjoys time in her garden and being with her grandsons. Black Sunflowers is her first novel.